Tag Archives: NAR

Welcome, faithful readers to an annual tradition here at Notorious ROB: making predictions for the coming year that are Guaranteed to be Wrong, or Your Money Back!

The musical pairings for this edition comes from the extraordinary and extraordinarily unique French cover band, Nouvelle Vague. I mean, who else does remakes of 80’s new wave hits with a vaguely self-aware melancholy infused with a 60’s bossa nova vibe? Yep, the French, that’s who.

I just got back from NAR New Orleans where I got to see old friends (not enough of y’all, because that event is so f’in huge) and meet some new friends. But I said that I would be watching for some things at the event. Turns out, there wasn’t much to watch. Not a lot of drama at all.

The CoX thing sailed through, but the result is that some workgroup will write up something. So we’ll wait to see what they come up with. The MLS stuff, with its very broad, general language, turned out to be important.

In fact, I think this vote approving the changes to the MLS is far more significant than most people seem to appreciate. The changes go right to the heart of what the MLS is and should be. And those changes may be really positive ones whose time has come.

For those reasons, I am now formally calling for a “Grand Conversation” about the MLS. If the industry is going to make these fundamental changes, then it ought to do so consciously, knowing what it wants to achieve, rather than making incremental changes here and there without realizing where it’s ended up.

This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for over a week now, except that work and life got in the way. Well, with my long drive to the Big Easy scheduled for tomorrow (by the way, I’ll be doing a fun and thought-provoking event with Stefan Swanepoel at the NAR Strategic Thinking Forum from 9AM to 11AM at the Hilton… /endselfpromo) I thought I’d spend a few minutes discussing something… intriguing.

Said something is the REALTOR(r) of the Future policy proposal that will be brought before the NAR Board of Directors in New Orleans. A faithful reader sent me a copy in PDF, which I’ve embedded below.

Since these are mere proposals, we’ll have a chance to delve into them deeper after the NAR Board acts on them. Changes may be made between now and the vote. But with that said, there are a few really intriguing things in this. We touch on those now.

I meant to get this up days ago, but between travel, client engagements, other writings, and an upcoming vacation, I just couldn’t. But if you’ve missed Part 1, you can check it out here.

In a nutshell, part 1 worries about whether the acquisition would be allowed to proceed without the government requiring that ListHub be spun off or sold off. It also speculates on whether large brokerages and franchises would be happy about a NEWSTOR.com extending into mortgages and elsewhere.

Since that post, and in my travels and conversations, I’ve heard quite a lot of opinions from agents, brokers, MLS CEO’s, Association Execs, and others about how this acquisition is a total gamechanger. In fact, no less an august personage than Brad Inman himself, the publisher of Inman News, wrote the following with the headline “Do Not Underestimate Rupert Murdoch“:

For certain, News Corp’s acquisition of Move changes the chessboard of online real estate. Any hubris at Zillow headquarters in Seattle has suddenly been clipped. But it eases FTC approval of the Zillow-Trulia merger because suddenly there is formidable competition.

Most importantly, this move will spawn greater innovation for the consumer and better offers to agents and brokers. Some will argue it gives the real estate industry relief from a monolithic distribution partner, solving a vexing problem in one clean sweep. But the industry should still be on its toes: Murdoch and Zillow should never be underestimated.

I cite Brad Inman because he’s such a respected part of the industry who speaks so rarely that when he does speak, it gets people’s attention. I also cite it because I think his views here are echoed in the views of so many others I’ve spoken with about the News-Move deal.

The core idea expressed by those folks is something like, “Now that News Corp. is in the mix, Zillow had better watch out!” That idea, in turn, is supported by two assumptions:

News Corp and REA have far superior management talent than does Move/NAR, and freed up from meddling by NAR, the new Realtor.com is going to get super-duperific.

News Corp will leverage its immense media assets to drive traffic to Realtor.com like Black Friday drives shoppers to WalMart.

Both of those assumptions may turn out to be true. But from where I sit today, I think both assumptions are rather… optimistic… or overblown… or simply wrong. News Corp’s taking over Move may turn out to be a gamechanger, of course, but I see nothing yet that suggests any such conclusion.

Rupert Murdoch: the patron of REALTORS everywhere? (And his wife… oh my… we need more Asians in RE…)

By now, I’m sure any reader of mine knows that we have seen the second major blockbuster deal in the digital real estate space, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp agreeing to buy Move, Inc., the operator of Realtor.com, Top Producer, Tiger Leads, ListHub, and other brands. It’s an all-cash offer of $21 per share, which comes to $950 million as of this writing.

There are all sorts of interesting things to think about and wonder about here, and I’m writing this post in large part to understand my own thinking about this deal. Quite frankly, this is very different from Zillow buying Trulia — they’re both portals, in the same business, and they’re getting bigger. This is a media company that has significant digital real estate operations (2/3 owner of REA, the Australian near-monopoly on online real estate ) buying a U.S. portal.

So I put “Part 1″ above, because I rather think there may be multiple parts to this one. Let’s get into it.